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To get a newspaper, you can schlep to the corner and pop a coin into a metal box every day, or you can have the daily fishwrap delivered to your door. Online, you have a similar choice: Either you spend time using search engines, news sites, and Web-based help tools to find information, or you simply subscribe to newsletters that send what you need to your in-box.

We subscribed to a slew of newsletters and mailing lists--valuable and sometimes provocative online sources of timely technology news, useful tips, and links to shareware, services, and helpful (as well as entertaining) Web sites. From this pool of information providers, we selected the 15 newsletters and mailing lists that can help you get the most out of your PC.

What's in a Newsletter?

A good newsletter gives you a regular dose of the information you need, in a small, easily digestible package. A great one is like a candy bar: You want another as soon as you've finished the first.

Among our favorites is "Lockergnome," in which Chris Pirillo divulges tips and shareware recommendations, and explains tech concepts like digital rights management in language Mickey Mouse could understand. Pirillo publishes eight newsletters on different computer topics. ( PC World and Lockergnome share links on one another's newsletters.)

Personality drives many a newsletter. For example, Woody Leonhard, author of seven different e-mail publications, amusingly bashes Microsoft (he calls himself a "Certified Office Victim") in his "Woody's Office for Mere Mortals" newsletter, while in the same breath providing useful downloads and tips to Office users.

The kookier "Internet Tourbus" is as likely to provide tips about spam as it is to have links to sites like Moviepoopers.com, where you can get one-sentence summaries to ruin hundreds of films you haven't seen. One issue promised, "you'll finish this tour smarter and better looking than the average Internet user." Don't hold your breath for that one, but "Tourbus" does offer a lot of choice tips.

At the other end of the spectrum, few newsletters are as dry as the About.com offerings--though their tips are great. The "editor and guide" for each particular topic provides remarkably little personality. If Dragnet's Joe Friday weren't a fictional character, this would have been his favorite newsletter: Just the tips, ma'am.

We also covered mailing lists because they can provide quick tips, and they work like newsletters, with one exception: A mailing list is a conversation among the list members. Depending on the traffic level, a busy mailing list could quickly bury you in e-mail. Digests--collections of posts from mailing lists, message boards, or Usenet newsgroups--make these subscriptions more manageable, providing in a single e-mail the many messages that may come to a list or get posted on a board in a day.

Each message might be only a few kilobytes in size, but it adds up fast. Depending on the service you subscribe to, and whether you choose to receive plain-text or HTML versions, you might end up with a mountain of e-mail help in no time.

Staunching the flow of e-mail is easy. Most newsletters include an unsubscribe link in each e-mail message. The New York Times, however, does not offer such a link in its newsletters; you must click on the Subscriber Services link at www.nytimes.com to unsubscribe.

Keenly sensitive to the issue of spam, most of the organizations and individuals who run the lists, newsletters, and digests we evaluated promise never to send you anything other than what you sign up for.

With so many newsletters out there, we didn't have the space to cover them all.

Many of the newsletter publishers we evaluated in the chart also produce other mailings about narrower topics, such as help with specific applications or tips for PDA users. Likewise, some solo newsletters cover very specific technology topics. For instance, surfers who are politically minded probably will want to follow Declan McCullagh's popular Politech list to keep abreast of legal issues pertaining to technology, like copy protection or online wiretap laws. If you're worried about (or fascinated with) online crime, the scambusters.org list provides details about the latest Internet fraud schemes, viruses, and urban legends. No matter your field of interest, there's probably a newsletter for you.

We didn't review our own nine terrific (in our unbiased opinion, of course) newsletters. We deliver computer news and product reviews daily. Every week we dispatch a summary of the latest stories on our site in "Weekly Brief," links to the best downloads in "Hot Shareware," Steve Bass's quirky Home Office column, plus tips for photo editing, mobile computing, and more. You can sign up on our subscription page at PC World's Newsletters or on the left side of our home page.

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